Why are Arizona’s COVID-19 hotspots a secret?

It’s widely known by now that Arizona leads the world of late when it comes to the coronavirus.

The question is, where are people getting it?

Unfortunately, our leaders don’t seem inclined to tell us where, specifically, people are picking up the disease. Either that, or they have no clue, which is even worse.

For weeks now, The Arizona Republic’s Rachel Leingang and other reporters have been asking county officials across the state to disclose the places where people have been exposed to the novel coronavirus.

Their answer: everywhere.

But that’s not an answer, that’s a dodge.

Other states have announced coronavirus hotspots — that people have contracted the virus at this restaurant or that place of employment. They consider it vital information for the public to know during a public health emergency.

In June, county health officials in Michigan announced they had linked at least 76 cases of COVID-19 to a college bar in Grosse Pointe. Michigan public health officials have put out press releases, advising people to get tested if they have been to specific places where they might have been exposed to the disease.

County health officials in Arizona have not disclosed any outbreaks tied to bars.

A county health department in West Virginia recently reported that 205 people were believed to have been exposed to the virus at a Planet Fitness. The Hawaii Department of Health recently disclosed that at least nine people were exposed during a large fitness class held at one of the state’s gyms.

County health officials in Arizona have not disclosed any cases of gyms tied to the virus.

Or any restaurants or any churches or child care centers or any protests, political rallies or other places where people continue to gather.

Here in America’s hotspot, we get crickets.

Has there been an outbreak in your child’s day care center or the one you’re considering for your son or daughter? Public health officials know. They just won’t tell us.

How about in my church? Or your grocery store? Or the restaurant down the street?

Was any particular gym — or even all of them in general — known to be a spreader of the disease before Ducey ordered them all closed last week?

Every week, reporters pose the question to county health officials, who are supposed to be tracing where people are picking up the disease. And every week they get some version of this answer:

“I understand why people want to know where people are getting COVID-19, but it’s important to know that COVID-19 is circulating throughout the community,” Dr. Rebecca Sunenshine, Maricopa County’s medical director of disease control, said during a Wednesday press conference.

Maricopa County spokesman Fields Moseley told me Thursday investigators are focused more on identifying who an infected person has come in contact with rather than where they got it. He said that’s tough to pinpoint in a community where the virus is widespread.

“If a high-risk location is identified as having an exposure, Maricopa County works with the facility to address infection control,” he said. “If a place of employment or residence meets our internal criteria for a cluster of cases, we to continue to follow that location.”

They just don’t clue any of us into the secret.

Maricopa County is the hardest hit region in the state has been hit harder over the last week than anywhere in the world in terms of the rate of spread of the disease, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

Really, is it asking so much that we get a hint about where people are picking up this disease?

Instead, we are told to stay home and hide in the closet, all while wearing a mask, and don’t, under any circumstances, seek out human contact this week or next month or maybe even for the next year.

While such dire warnings may be good advice, they aren’t going to stop people from living their lives.

And so it seems to me it might be helpful for us to at least know a few of the places we might want to avoid — or that we might want to get tested if we were there during the relevant time frame when people were exposed.

If our leaders, after months of contact tracing, have no clue where those places are, it might be nice to know that, too.

Perhaps Ducey could justify his decision to close gyms but not restaurant indoor dining rooms because one has proved to be a spreader of COVID-19 while the other has not.

The problem is, we don’t know. Public health officials must know the locations of some outbreaks. They just aren’t telling us, which leads me to wonder.

Whose health, exactly, are they protecting?